Overnight Open Thread (3-31-2014)

"If I had known when I was shot down that I would be there more than seven years, I would have died of despondency, of despair," he told Investor's Business Daily. "But I didn't. It was one minute at a time, one hour, one week, one year and so on. If you look at it like that, anybody can do anything."

A couple weeks ago, we learned from leaked documents that the NSA has the capability to record an entire country's calls, texts, and email in real time. That's a hell of a capability, and those documents revealed that it was being used in one country. Now, thanks to a retired NSA leader, we know which country that is: Iraq.

...No matter what the reasoning was, it's still pretty insane that the NSA can monitor every single phone call, text, and email in a country. They're doing that with six countries now, according to the leaked documents. But it's even more insane that friends of the NSA think fessing up to it is going to make the agency look good.

Apparently we're supposed to be outraged by this at least according to the writer. But then this kind of information collecting is the whole raison d'ętre of the NSA in the first place. If they're not trying to capture any signal intelligence of potential interest in a country up until recently thousands of US troops were fighting in, then I want an accounting of all the goddamn money we gave them and where their time was spent.

And the fact that this shocks and infuriates Glenn Greenwald: Priceless

A new lawsuit has revealed the extent of former President Clinton's friendship with a fundraiser who was later jailed for having sex with an underage prostitute.

Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who served time in 2008 for his illegal sexual partners, included up multiple trips to the onetime billionaire's private island in the Caribbean where underage girls were allegedly kept as sex slaves... the two men's friendship ... seems to have ended abruptly around the time of Epstein's arrest...

...Tales of orgies and young girls being shipped to the island, called Little St. James, have been revealed as part of an ongoing lawsuit between Epstein and his former lawyers Scott Rothstein and Bradley Edwards...

In fact, a right-wing friend mine of who works in politics saw Johnson's tweet and assumed McCain must have been joking. Surely, with immigration reform already imperiled by righty opposition, a GOPer already loathed by tea partiers wouldn't offer up the effort as a prayer to Teddy's memory. Would he?

Many Detroit residents have a more immediate problem than their city's tortured bankruptcy proceedings: their water is about to be shut off. After keeping the pipes open to everyone throughout the winter, the Detroit Water and Sewage Department is notifying thousands of residents that they'll be cut off unless they pay their bills. Just under half of all customers are delinquent, and together they owe more than $100 million.

At least in this case, the mountain of unpaid bills isn't the city's fault. But it certainly is to blame for leaving the agency in such dire financial straits. Despite annual revenues just south of $1 billion, its outstanding debt is six times that amount, and the system will need a number of expensive upgrades over the next few years.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled homeopathic remedies made by a company called Terra-Medica because they may contain actual medicine -- possibly penicillin or derivatives of the antibiotic.

Terra-Medica creates a range of homeopathic capsules, suppositories and ointments under clinical-sounding brand names including Pleo-Fort, Pleo-Quent and Pleo-EX. The FDA has found that 56 lots of the drugs may contain penicillin or derivatives of penicillin, which may have been produced during fermentation.

Okay it's the Onion but if you've ever had it happen to your Tivo, you'll understand the pain and heartbreak.

The Talbott family has suffered a tragic loss. Everything the family had saved for years, all of it disappeared in an instant. Now as The Onion reports, they set to the task of rebuilding their lives after the huge setback of a crashed DVR.